Marshmallow Fluff

Today, I found a new company that’s sold my email address to spammers, and it was a quite surprising one: iStockPhoto. They’re a pretty reputable firm owned by Getty Images.

It reminded me that I’ve been meaning to make a list of all the companies I’ve caught who’ve sold my email address (or at least have lax enough security that it’s been pilfered by hackers).

I assume most of them do it to make a quick buck and figure no one will ever notice in the deluge of spam we all get every day. They’re wrong.

Here’s the list. I’ll keep it updated as I find more.

• iStockPhoto
• Leveractive
• Fotopedia
• Equifax
• Skinit
• Macheist
• Invisible Fence
• Whrrl
• TV Watch
• Plagiarism Today
• Capture Cincinnati (that one really hurts; I was a HUGE supporter for a long time)

So, how do I know all these companies have sold (or lost) my email address?

I own my own mail domain and whenever I sign up for a new site, I use a different email address (e.g., istockphoto@xxxxxxxxx.com). They all come in to one central inbox so I can read the ones that I care about, with the really important ones getting forwarded to a priority address that pushes directly to my phone.

I’ve been doing this for about six years now. Google’s spam filter catches 99.9% of it all these days, but at the time, it was a handy way to block a bad egg from sending any more emails. Even though it’s no longer really necessary, it’s become a habit, so I keep doing it.